Sunday, October 16, 2011

I love it when my dyvers interests collide. In this case, it's Flashman-era Afghanistan and Romeroan zombie apocalypses.

While psyching myself up for tonight's premiere of Season 2 of ABC's The Walking Dead, I ran across this BBC article alleging that the actor who played SWAT Team member Roger in 1978's Dawn of The Dead is the direct descendant of 19th century American soldier-of-fortune Josiah Harlan, who won the title "Prince of Ghor" for himself and his descendants in perpetuity.

"It's like the end of Spartacus. I have seen that movie half a dozen times and I still don't know who the real Spartacus is. And that is what makes that movie a classic whodunit."--Michael Scott

Long before Chris Pontius and Steve-O were playing Hot Potato with the nests of Africanized Guatemalan Insanity Hornets and before Johnny Knoxville and Ban Margera got the idea to play mumbleypeg blindfolded with a welding torch, the masses were entertained by other men whose shtick was doing harm to other men. AoM has a great primer to those of you who have not watched every episode of Spartacus.

Monday, October 10, 2011

"You must admit, it's hard to imagine this place being conducive to anyone's mental health." —Batman, on Arkham Asylum

I've pretty much abandoned Falling Skies, and I'm desperately hoping that the writers of Terra Nova develop something beyond dinosaur-of-the-week with only the badassness of Stephen Lang and its family-friendliness to keep it on my radar. But there is one show this season that has me eagerly awaiting the next episode.

FX's American Horror Story is the story of the Harmon family. Psychiatrist Ben Harmon moves his wife Vivien (played by Connie Britten) and his daughter Violet (played by Taissa Farmiga) cross-country to Los Angeles, leaving behing mundane misfortunes and misdeeds like miscarriage and adultery only to find supernatural horrors at their new Hollywood Victorian abode.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Usually, when folks suffer the consequences of their bad choices, we say that they are reaping what they have sown. But, in the case of Georgia's Arizona-style immigration law , the state is NOT reaping what it has sown. Millions of dollars worth of what it has sown.

Not since Sherman's Army of The Tennessee dropped in for torch-lit Rape & Pillage™ has Georgia's farmland experienced the kind of ruin recently wrought by the state's legislative locusts.

Get-tough-on-illegal-immigration laws have inadvertently created manpower shortages on farms. The result: produce rots in the vine, and those "Made in America" fruits and vegetables will be replaced with inexpensive imports.

The great irony here is that the same crowd that chants the mantra of "limited government" is the same one that pushed this business-busting legislation through. The man who signed this into law is the same Governor who was smart enough and courageous enough to spearhead an initiative to clear his state's prisons of nonviolent drug offenders, the victims of Georgia's last bone-headed legislative crackdown, to make room for gang-bangers, rapists, and child molesters.

So far the conscription of these criminals into a makeshift Convict Land Army directed to the fields by their parole agents is the only solution the government has tendered to deal with the great migrant farmworker desertion.

Many of these felons don't last a week. These are the same offenders who prefer risking the shivs, shanks, and sodomy of jail to working eight hours a day in a nice air conditioned McDonald's. Yet, for some reason, now they are going to toil from sun-up to sundown under Dixie's infernal sun for a pittance?

After much press, publicity, and serious Harold Hill hucksterism, Annie Wilkes of the GOP has announced that she will cease teasing the Ma-and Pa-Kettle wing of her party with the notion that she will be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States.

She is going to stay on the porch, cut bait, and get the hell out of the way.